Wharton's odyssey

Wharton's odyssey

Friday 6 August 2004 19.29 EDT
First published on Friday 6 August 2004 19.29 EDT

In 1888, when Edith Wharton was 26 and had been married for three years, long before she started to be a published author, she and her husband and a well-travelled friend, James van Alen, took a nine-week cruise through the Mediterranean and the Aegean on a luxurious chartered steam-yacht, the Vanadis. She would call it "the greatest step forward in my making". It cost the Whartons $10,000, their combined inherited income for that year, and it was an ambitious journey. Starting from Algiers on February 17, they went to Tunis, Malta, Sicily, Corfu, the Cycladean islands and Rhodes. Then, in April, up the Turkish coast, across the Aegean to Mount Athos, down to Marathon and Athens, west (like Odysseus) to Ithaca, up the wild Dalmatian coast (with a trip inland to "unconquered Montenegro"), and last across the Adriatic to Italy, to Ancona.

Many of the places they stopped at had never seen tourists before. Wharton, steeped in Ruskin and Homer and Goethe, was an informed, discriminating and intrepid traveller. She made up her own mind about what she saw, and was happy to take long donkey and mule rides to remote Greek monasteries and to make nothing of rough seas. She had a strong historical imagination, and was especially stirred by the stories of the Knights of St John in Rhodes, by the terrible after-effects of the Turkish massacre and the earthquake at Chios, by the lives of the women she observed, by the landscapes of Sicily and by the forbidden monasteries on Mount Athos. She kept a detailed and vivid diary, good practice for her later travel-writings in Italy, France and Morocco. For many years this diary was thought to have disappeared, until a French scholar, Claudine Lesage (who was working on Conrad at the time) came across it in the public library at Hyères, where Wharton had her Mediterranean home from 1920. It was published in a modest way by a French university press in 1992.

It's a mark of the enormous shift in Wharton's reputation that the diary is now being reissued in a lavishly illustrated edition. Apart from a teenage novel and some early verses, this is the first piece of Wharton's mature writing that we have.